The Jacket of Doom

"The sight of him [Gordon Brown] trying to enjoy his holiday while wearing a grey sports jacket and a pinstriped shirt with only one button undone will be the final straw for most people......Not since Neil Kinnock's windswept collapse on a beach has a carefully engineered photo opportunity said so much about a political leader's unsuitability for the job."
- Melissa Kite in the Torygraph

I think this is the same woman I heard on the radio saying much the same thing about Gordon Brown wearing a jacket on holiday. She said "of course, it shouldn't matter" but then proceeded to say why it mattered hugely.
The only advantage to listening to such infantile burblings is that you realise that however much time and talent you might have wasted in your life, it pales into insignificance compared to the time-wasting preoccupations of cretinous media whores like this.
Note that the wearing of the jacket is not just a fashion crime. It renders him unfit to be Prime Minister.

She's not the only one. There has been acres of analysis of Brown's jacket and unfavourable comparisons with Cameron's multi-coloured shorts which apparently make the Old Etonian (whose other favourite holiday is shooting on his father-in-law's Scottish estate - no cameras allowed there, of course) a man of the people.
One of today's papers carried the even more shocking revelation that Brown had been observed wearing his jacket while lying on the beach.

Whilst I have many political disagreements with Gordon Brown, I can empathise with him in matters sartorial.
I never sally forth from Lupin Towers on even the hottest days without wearing a jacket. This is for purely practical reasons. The male jacket is a design classic that has hardly changed over the years. It usually has five different pockets. These are essential for carrying my wallet, loose change, reading glasses and possibly a mobile phone. Where do people put all these things without a jacket?

One option would be a 'man bag', a male handbag, but then the local yobs would shout "Poof!" at me. Although factually correct, I wouldn't want to give them the pleasure. It also says to a thief 'here are all my valuables handily stored in a single container for you to snatch.'
The other option is to stuff your wallet in the back pocket of your trousers, another open invitation to thieves. Yet millions of people walk around with the top of their wallet protruding from the back pocket of their jeans. These people all shop at Asda, for that supermarket had a long-running commercial that featured shoppers patting the back pocket of their jeans to indicate how much money they were saving and then offering up to some light-fingered latter-day Fagin.

Can you imagine the ridicule Brown would have suffered if he'd kitted himself out in T-shirt, shorts and flip-flops? This is the mother-and-father of no-win situations for poor Brown. But the jacket was the right choice because in matters of dress as in everything else the best policy is "to thine own self be true."
That I can identify with a man who takes a suitcase full of books on holiday and wears a jacket on the beach presumably makes me as weird as Gordon. But I don't give a fuck. And neither should he.